I used the app dev side because I think it's more illustrative. There are various teams with various competing priorities who have collectively developed a prod

I used the app dev side because I think it's more illustrative. There are various teams with various competing priorities who have collectively developed a product which is horribly slow. No individual developer is at fault. Some are efficient with their code, and some are less so. But there is no architecture team or mature SDLC to handle cross cutting concerns or a foundational platform for everyone to build from. Everyone is free to do their own thing and write code the way they want use whatever standards they can find on Google. In that world, just telling the devs to write more efficient code is insufficient to correct the course. The systemic problems that have developed require systemic solutions. A blanket "just do better" has never been useful to anyone.